Daniel Altschuler ’04 earns Rhodes Scholarship

Daniel L. Altschuler ’04 is among the 32 recipients of this year’s Rhodes Scholarships. A political science, black studies and Spanish major at Amherst, Altschuler plans to pursue an M.Phil. degree in development studies at Oxford University. He says he hopes that his experience at Oxford will help him “contribute meaningfully to development rooted in the experiences, voices and visions of marginalized communities around the world.”

Altschuler has considerable early experience in this area. As an Amherst student, he organized a conference on socially
responsible investing. Since graduating,
he has been traveling in Chile, South Africa and elsewhere on a Watson Fellowship, compiling an oral history of how urban shantytowns, rural towns and indigenous communities have made the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. While in South Africa, he worked with housing organizations and also founded Asifunde Bantwana, an after-school literacy program for young people at the Johannesburg Trust for the Homeless. Altschuler currently serves as a program associate at the Urban Homesteading
Assistance Board in New York, where he is helping convert six clusters of buildings in Harlem and the South Bronx to resident-owned and -managed limited equity cooperatives.

A member of the golf, tennis and soccer teams at Amherst, Altschuler graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Altschuler is the sixth Amherst College student to receive a Rhodes Scholarship in the past 25 years. Other recent recipients are Jordan Krall ’01 and Vaughn Gray ’00.

Rhodes Scholarships, which pay for two or three years of graduate study at Oxford, were established in 1902 by the will of Cecil Rhodes, the British philanthropist and African colonialist. Rhodes established the awards with hope that the “Rhodes Scholars would make an effective and positive contribution throughout the world.”